Qualcomm was the first to tell us that it expects to offer console level GPU performance in the not too distant future, generally hinting that its Adreno 3xx GPUs would get us there. NVIDIA shared this slide (pictured above) with us today that gives its take on where PC, console and mobile GPU performance will land over the coming years. There's nothing too revolutionary here but it does provide an interesting visual for much of what the GPU vendors have been talking about for the past couple of years.

The solid lines are estimated performance, while the dotted lines are trends. According to NVIDIA, somewhere in the 2013 - 2014 timeframe is when we'll get Xbox 360-class GPU performance out of mobile SoCs. The console line only has two points (Xbox 1 and Xbox 360), while the mobile line starts with the original iPhone, moves up to Tegra 2 and then follows Tegra 3.

These mobile SoCs are still limited by how much storage an app can take and controller support. Last I checked memory bandwidth was nowhere near the bandwidth even old systems like the PS3 and 360 had. For that power to be useful they need to address all those concerns too. Android has decent controller support, its just not widely used. And on the 360 some games now have to use multiple DVDs and some PS3 games are hitting the 25GB of single layer blu rays.

Also, development costs, most of these apps don't cost more than 7 dollars or so vs 60 dollar PC/console games, developer incentive to make something really great is low. Reply

Can anyone figure out why Nvidia, the leader in the dedicated GPU market cannot seem to produce a competitive mobile SoC. Even their latest chip, Tegra 3, is beaten badly by the IMG Tech PowerVR series.. And even Qualcomms chipsets and ARM's own Mali are as good or better.You would think Nvidia would be blowing away everyone ..Reply

I think I saw an article awhile back that had an explanation for it. If I remember correctly they were under the impression that the GPUs used in Tegra SoCs so far are based off old Geforce 7xxx series architecture rather than their newer unified shader architectures.

How true that is is beyond me, but that would atleast partially explain the difference. We should see a solid bump in Tegra4, I believe they are moving on to a more modern unified shader architecture of some sort for them.Reply

The Tegra 3 is a low cost high performance SoC.I think Nvidia mainly focused on the 4+1 cores, to make it a great tablet SoC which supports perfect multi-tasking and support for Windows 8 ARM, additionally they wanted to have the first quad core out.If you compare the die sizes of the Tegra 3 with them of other SoCs like the Apple A5, you'll notice that the Tegra 3 is tiny, and thus inexpensive to produce.Their GPU has average benchmark results, but I just think they had other priorities, like Windows support, quad core, ...It's also possible that the GPU performs poor in raw benchmarks, in computing things, but maybe has more hardware based accelerators which games explicitly have to make a use of, because if you take a look at the Anandtech game comparison between iOS and Nvidia Tegrazone, the NVidia ones have more effects and look better.(Simpler comparison: Two CPUs, both have to decode a video, the faster one, has higher results in benchmarks, but lacks a hardware video decoder, thus has to decode the video in software and can't keep up. The slower one, has lower benchmark results, but a hardware decoder, thus smooth video playback.I don't know if this fits for Tegra 3, but at least according to visual comparisons Tegra 3 games look impressive compared to the competition)Reply

so your point is? Have you read what I wrote? I said that the Tegra 3 is slower than others in benchmarks, but still manages to deliver better graphics in games. Isn't this what really is interesting?Sure, it would be nice to have a faster GPU, no question, but I don't understand why people say that the Tegra 3 is too slow!!, if it delivers better graphics, consuming less power and being cheaper to produce.I also don't understand why people say Tegra 3 is crap, just because it doesn't have the fastest GPU. The big thing NVidia achieved was to build the first power efficient quad core, which is, even after half a year, competive with currently released Krait processors.Reply